The Relief of Stress

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Karaoke is not what you think at all. The room, about the size of a semi-detached Scottish council house with the internal walls knocked out, is full of drunk Chinese guys. The lighting is 1970s porn movie. There are two TV screens, one generating the Karaoke and another for sport: dirt-track horse racing, cage-fighting or figure skating. Snacks lie ignored on the table. It is never clear who is paying. And yes, these guys sing. One of them will not be completely unbearably awful, but he will still be ear-splitting, embarrassing, woeful. All the rest will be beyond my lexical powers.

The backing tracks are more 1970’s porn and the background video is often 1970’s porn too, without the actual porn. Men, a bit like Tom Selleck or James Brolin, often in open necked shirts, squire women in paisley dresses and turquoise eye-shadow along rocky shores or around the kind of English country mansions most commonly found in suburbs of Santa Barbara. Maybe 1970s porn visionaries foresaw the whole karaoke thing and made these videos before getting down to the real business, because otherwise I have no idea where they came from.

Almost all Chinese songs are about the same thing: the pain of separation from the object of desire and the hopelessness of waves breaking on the shore. The happy ending will surely come after much suffering, but never actually makes it into the song. The song focuses on suffering alone (and the breaking of the waves / falling of the leaves / drying of the paint) and it is not just the singer who suffers, far from it. Suffering in lonely silence is not the Karaoke way. There is a feel of ‘Scottish’ ‘folk’ songs: marching home again through the bonny purple bamboo grove, after the famine, war, or the English/Japanese genocide; after the tide comes in.

Upon my arrival, someone will usually sing ‘in my honour’, to welcome me. There are few things I enjoy more than a fat millionaire, with immaculately boot-blacked hair and Harry Palmer glasses honoring me in ballad form, of how our suffering must go on till the moss grows thick on my grandfather’s gravestone, and I come home again to Wales, or some such.

Now, I don’t want anyone to get the impression that karaoke is about singing. Karaoke is about singing in the same way as cinema is about pop-corn. Karaoke is about the relief of stress, or ‘sex’ as it is known in the West. These caterwauling entrepreneurs are not alone in the room. There will be numerous girls, in various states of beauty, decay, drunkenness, undress, disease and tune. The only thing these girls will really have in common is imperfection of pitch and a preference for daytime TV and whisky over factory work.

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